On Tuesday night, the House passed Goodlatte’s bill Stop Slush Funds Acts of 2017 that “permanently bars federal agencies from requiring defendants to donate money to outside groups as part of settlement agreements, and requires that settlement money goes either directly to victims or to the Treasury.”

Texas House Speaker Joe Straus won’t run for re-election. One of Straus’ top lieutenants (one of his few remaining lieutenants), Byron Cook, isn’t running for re-election, either. The Republican caucus in the Texas House recently changed the rules by which a speaker is chosen – the caucus will now elect a candidate, and that candidate will be nominated in the House. Previously it was a free-for-all in the House, with anyone’s name placed in nomination before the entire membership, which resulted in Straus being elected speaker with support from Democrats and left-leaning Republicans. The new rules make it difficult for Straus to win the speaker post again, so he quit.

Since 2009, the Gates Foundation’s primary U.S. activity has focused on establishing and implementing Common Core, a set of centrally mandated curriculum rules and tests for what children are to learn in each K–12 grade, with the results linked to school and teacher ratings and punitive measures for low performers. The Gates Foundation has spent more than $400 million itself and influenced $4 trillion in U.S. taxpayer funds towards this goal. Eight years later, however, Bill Gates is admitting failure on that project, and a “pivot” to another that is not likely to go any better.

Kurdish workers and Peshmerga soldiers fled an oil processing facility last week because they were afraid of Iranian Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani and his Shiite militias. Iraq engineers who arrived at the facility found alarms ringing, so they shut down the oil wells. Apparently they haven’t figured out how to restart production, which cost Iraq $200 million in revenue over the course of a week.

Sometimes people put Schermer’s argument more baldly. They ask something like this: “Do you really think Bubba in camo gear hiding in the forest is going to take on the U.S. military? The U.S. military has nuclear weapons!”

Who exactly do you think has stymied the U.S. in Afghanistan for 16 years? The Taliban is made up of Afghan Bubbas. The Taliban doesn’t need to defeat nuclear weapons, though they are humiliating a nuclear power for the second time in history. They use a mix of Kalashnikovs and WWII-era bolt-action rifles. Determined insurgencies are really difficult to fight, even if they are only armed with Enfield rifles and you can target them with a TOW missiles system that can spot a cat in the dark from two miles away. In Iraq, expensive tanks were destroyed with simple improvised explosives.

For years, the Edina Public Schools (EPS) have been one of the brightest stars in the firmament of Minnesota public education. Parents who moved to the affluent Twin Cities suburb gladly paid a hefty premium for a house, because it meant their kids could attend the district’s top-notch schools.

But today, test scores are sinking in Edina’s fabled schools. One in five Edina High School students can’t read at grade level and one in three can’t do grade-level math. These test results dropped EHS’s ranking among Minnesota high schools from 5th to 29th in reading proficiency, and from 10th to 40th in math proficiency between 2014 and 2017. Across the district, about 30 percent of kids are not “on track for success” in reading, and the same is true for math.

A number of factors may be at work here. Clearly, however, there’s been a profound shift in district leaders’ educational philosophy. In place of academic excellence for all, the district’s primary mission is now to ensure that students think correctly on social and political issues — most importantly, on race and “white privilege.”

The SAAR network is a web of over 100 purported charities, nonprofits, and financial firms, centered in northern Virginia, that were accused of laundering money for terrorism. The SAAR Foundation, the nucleus of the network, was set up in 1983 under the patronage of Sulaiman Abdul Aziz al-Rajhi, a wealthy Saudi banking magnate who is strongly suspected of supporting al-Qaeda. The foundation was dissolved in 2000 after coming under U.S. terror scrutiny. Though federal agents uncovered staggering amounts of evidence against members of the SAAR network, political interference led to the case being dropped. As a consequence, entities within the SAAR network have been free to continue their activities and even influence American elections. The American public deserves a chance to see the evidence against SAAR figures and to break up their cozy political alliances with favor-seeking politicians.

Hudson’s cancellation of the Guo meeting coincides with the visit to the United States this week by China’s Minister of Public Security, Guo Shengkun.

Guo Shengkun is scheduled to hold talks at the Justice Department on law enforcement and cyber security talks with senior Justice and State Department officials, including Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on Wednesday.

The State Department said in announcing the talks Sept. 28 that they will include discussion of the repatriation of Chinese fugitives.

Konashenkov said around 50 of Golani’s bodyguards and 12 Nusra Front field commanders had been killed in the same air strike, including a close aide to Golani and the head of the militant group’s security service.

Like this:

ISIS' “Jihadi John” is Mohammed Emwazi, who was born in Kuwait and raised in London. He has a computer science degree from the University of Westminster, so someone needs to tell the State Department's Marie Harf that lack of economic opportunities probably didn't radicalize him.

Finally, Cruz reminded everyone that Ronald Reagan didn’t lead a political revolution by worrying about positioning on a political spectrum to strategize how to fragment the electorate. He stood on principled conservatism unapologetically, drew a line in the sand, and attracted new voters and crossovers by drawing a sharp contrast. To paraphrase, if the choice is between two candidates who are almost indistinguishable, voters will choose their party’s nominee every time. Only by providing a real choice — and a commitment to stick to those principles — will Republicans win another presidential election.

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal excoriated Congressional Republicans for not even trying to repeal ObamaCare: “If you are one of those unsophisticated voters out there in America who thought that you voted for Republican candidates last November so that they will repeal and replace Obamacare, I have bad news for you – Many of the ”thinkers“ on the Republican or conservative side in Washington are too scared to do it. It’s actually worse than that, they think replacing Obamacare with a conservative market-based approach that tackles the issue of cost is a lost cause. They think that we cannot repeal Obamacare and start over.”

I think the Electronic Frontier Foundation pursues noble goals, but they’re naive about the means to achieve them — they usually place their trust in government regulators who are as corrupt (if not more so) than the internet service providers they rail against. For years the EFF lobbied the FCC to enact net neutrality, and now that they’re on the verge of getting what they want, they’ve discovered that the FCC’s net neutrality regulations will probably include a “general conduct rule” that can be bent to enable the FCC to regulate broadband internet services in any way it sees fit. The EFF opposes such a rule. Thanks for letting us know at the eleventh hour.